You run various fundraising campaigns throughout the year, working hard to meet your overall fundraising goal. But how do you which campaign is producing the best results?
Using various fundraising metrics, you can track the performance of individual campaigns, overall return on investment, retention rate, donor growth rate, and more.
7 Metrics to Track Fundraising Success
1. Cost Per Dollar Raised (CPDR)
Cost per dollar raised calculates how much money it takes to raise one dollar. This metric is important to track and benchmark against, working to drive the cost down and dollars raised up.
To figure out your cost per dollar raised, take total expenses (per strategy or overall) and divide by total revenue generated (per strategy or overall).
If the number you get is greater than one, then you lost money on the fundraising strategy. However, if the number is less than one, then your strategy produced a return.
2. Return on Investment (ROI)
Return on investment is actually the inverse of cost per dollar raised, measuring the overall success of a particular campaign or your overall fundraising strategy.
ROI is calculated by dividing the amount of money generated for a given strategy/campaign by the expenses required to create the strategy/campaign.
3. Average Gift Size
This is a good number to track both year-over-year and by individual fundraising campaign. If your average gift size goes up, more people are giving larger amounts. If the number goes down, donors are not giving as much.
When tracked by individual campaign, you’ll be able to see which events produce the largest average gift size and tailor your campaigns accordingly.
4. Donor Retention Rate
Measuring donor retention is a way to see how engaged your donors are year-over-year. You should want this number to go up, as acquiring new donors is often more expensive than retaining.
5. Donor Growth Rate
In conjunction with donor retention rate, you should also track your donor growth rate. This number gives you an idea of how well your nonprofit is growing.
Ideally, you’ll have both donor retention rate and donor growth rate increasing together (not necessarily at the same pace, but increasing nonetheless).
6. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate can be used to measure the success of various nonprofit activities. You can use it to see:
- Percentage of people who sign up for an event from an email campaign
- Percentage of people who donate from attending an event
- Percentage of people who donate online through a dedicated landing page
Understanding your conversion rate on your various campaigns and events will help tweak and improve your strategy, which hopefully results in more donations.
7. Online Gift Percentage
Online giving is a popular channel for people to donate to their causes. As online giving is only going to grow, it’s important to know now how much of your donations come from your online efforts – and track throughout the year to see how well you’re doing.
You could even track average gift size of onling giving to see if you typically receive larger/smaller donations through online giving versus other channels.
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Fundraising is integral to your overall success. Being able to measure and track the performance of your campaigns and overall strategy will help you grow – and allow you to fulfill your mission.